CASE STUDY – AJUA
The future of customer experience data.
Rebranding mSurvey from a product-led brand to AJUA, a new experience-led brand that's working to shape the future of CX and the experience economy.
mSurvey has been helping organisations across Africa understand and better serve their audiences for the better part of 10 years. mSurvey approached ARK to help it diversify its product range beyond surveys, and create a brand that charts the future for a bold vision. The future of Integrated Customer Experience.
The Big Data Opportunity
Data is having an increased influence on the world of business and can be a powerful tool that unlocks patterns in behaviour, content preferences and transaction history. Finding insights from this data is hugely important as the commercial environment moves from a retail focused economy to an experience focused economy, where how the user feels is becoming more of a differentiator than price. Without an outstanding ability to analyse this data it becomes nothing more than 0s and 1s. Finding these insights can be even more challenging on the African continent where the majority of transactions are informal and difficult to track.
mSurvey has been recognised as a global pioneer in the world of Integrated Customer Experience, a category they are defining on the continent, using consumer data and insights to create truly exemplary customer journeys.
Rebrand Strategy
An Immersive Approach
It’s common for startups to name their organization after their first product, the one introduce themselves to the world with. To fully understand how the company aimed to grow their brand beyond their initial offering we set out on an in depth immersion exercise which we divided into two key phases. The first phase involved an analysis of the organization, context, and future mapping with the company leadership team. Thereafter, we conducted several ideation workshops and interviews with relevant stakeholders to build a bigger picture of the potential at play.
Brand Positioning Strategy
Given our findings we began to lay the groundwork for creating robust brand positioning strategy coupled with an endorsed Brand Architecture. This gave the brand we created the latitude to extend to multiple different products and markets, with the support of a singular and powerful corporate brand.
Naming
Our creative process led us to the creation of the AJUA brand, to replace mSurvey which would be retained as a product sub-brand.
Our idea was inspired by the Mancala – the name given to a family of strategy games that are played with seeds in holes on the ground or a board. The Mancala game is believed to have originated in East or Northern Africa with some evidence suggesting it was played in ancient Egypt. From that point it was spread across the world by traders and grew to what it is today; a game with 800 different names played across over 99 countries across the globe.
Brand Identity
The version of the game played in Kenya’s Nyanza province is called Ajua, derived from the seed that is often used to play the game in the region. The suffix, -jua, in Kiswahili means Sun or knowledge, symbolising the company’s position as shedding light and imparting insights to its clients.
When creating the Brand Identity we extended the metaphor of the seeds that are used to play the game to represent data points. The system of circles relates easily to the world of data and creates space for interesting data visualisation.
Dynamic System
We wanted to build a rich and dynamic brand identity system that was scalable and functional.
This set us down a path we’d been down before (a decade ago with Flash) – writing generative processing algorithms to build dynamically generated art and interactive animation.
Our particle system was built around the idea of interconnected data – each circle is a datapoint that clusters with other points, symbolising the magnitude and multitude of datasets interacting with each other to create a total customer experience – much like real life.
Brand Extension
Extending this system opened up a world of possibilities in the sphere of infographics, information and communication design.
